MOG Blog
Drones in Vineyards -- Technology Is Not the Limiting Factor
The trade media is bombarding us with messages about how drones are going to revolutionize agriculture. Winegrape growers seem to be a particular target. Is this because the media thinks grape growers have money burning a hole in their pockets? In any case, one is left with the impression that some technological breakthroughs have occurred recently to put us on the precipice of drones changing how we farm. Likely it’s the fact that the price of a good drone has come down significantly.
The reality in my view, however, is the limiting factor in the impact drones will have in agriculture is not the technology of drones, or the sensors they will carry to collect images and digital data. The bottleneck is going to be our ability to interpret the data they provide to us in a way that can be applied on the farm/in the vineyard that will reduce costs and/or increase revenue. (Shown above is an image from UC Davis of a Yamaha remote-controlled helicopter.)
The most obvious example of this challenge is the promise that the use of video from drones will help us detect pest problems. The use of remote sensing, the official term for using something in the air to capture data remote from the site being scanned, has been around as long as there have been cameras and aircraft. My original field was forest entomology and we tried for decades to use aerial images to detect pests before they got out of hand. However, then as now the problem is that by the time a pest problem, particularly insects or mites, is detectable by a camera or other sensor, economic damage has already occurred. In other words it’s too late to be of economic benefit.
The use of drones to take NDVI images (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) appears to show promise. However, interpreting those images is a work in progress, too. We do appear to be entering the age of Big Data in farming and drones will be a way to collect it. However, I do believe technology is not the limiting factor, it is our ability to interpret the data.
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